To whom it may concern

It's Tuesday, so today you get a choice between two prompts. Pick one, combine both, pit them against each other - on Tuesday, you choose!

This week, your options are:

Mark Twain Boarding House versus Wolf Mountain

The mouth of the cave did not have a door, so Sara Sue knocked lightly against the stalagmite nearest the entrance by way of announcing herself. From deeper inside there came the metallic whisper of scale moving against scale, and a voice like great boulders grinding together echoed out from the gloom.

"What?"

"Brought you some bits from the horror section at Eerie Video," she said. "Also some M&Ms and a new type of microwave popcorn."

Twin spots of fire appeared in the darkness, thirty feet off the ground and blinking hazily.

"Really?" it said. "What kind?"

"Bubble-gum wasabi, apparently."

Ongoing Verse: Pay Attention

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Marshall and Simon watched as the two men from the Eerie Art Gallery, Performance Space and Recycling Centre lashed what was left of the crumpled four-door sedan onto their flatbed. With the wreck successfully extracted from the grassy slopes that marked one of Wolf Mountain's more forgiving faces, the boys could see the deep gouge carved by the vehicles' passage where it had gone over the railings.

Simon whistled.

"Mars, check it out," he said. "Looks like there really is a phantom hitchhiker haunting this stretch of road. Looks like Syndi won't be losing her driving privileges after all."

Marshall rummaged in his backpack until he found a cheap disposable camera - no way he was wasting expensive Polaroid film trying to get his idiot sister out of trouble - and snapped a few photos showing a set of glowing ecoplastic footprints in the curve of the road just ahead of where the driver lost control.

"I wonder why the ghost's never appeared to us," he mused, prompting a strange look from his most trusted associate.

"She probably doesn't want to hitch a ride on our handlebars," he said.

Marshall sighed.

"True," he said. "I guess bikes aren't that great for haunting."

Ongoing Verse: Trusted Associates Inc

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Ongoing Verse: Teller Family History

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It's Tuesday, so today you get a choice between two prompts. Pick one, combine both, pit them against each other - on Tuesday, you choose!

This week, your options are:

Lake Eerie versus Wolf Mountain

Episode 13 of Eerie Indiana "Mr. Chaney" pic.twitter.com/52FC3c8fak

— James Gormanley (@JamesGormanley) November 8, 2020

The Harvest King was waiting for her beneath the spreading canopy of an old oak tree. His crown of green was bright with gold leaves of almost-ripened corn and in the places where it's twisting vines grew straight out of his head, blood-bright berries clotted and clustered.

"You came," he said, and it's almost the voice that Janet remembers, undercut with the howl of a hunting wolf and the wind up on the mountain.

He holds out his hand, which is pale and pink and human, and when she reaches for it she touches the whirring blades of a thresher.

Ongoing Verse: The Children

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Ongoing Verse: Janet

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Ongoing Verse: Harvest

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"That kind of statement is exactly why you're going to pay us our asking price," said Simon, pulling out a notebook and flipping it to a page marked with a neon orange sticky note.

"One, because you don't realise that the Ratking can and will discorporate into individual rats if it thinks that will give it a better chance of survival, for example when it falls off a mountainside and needs to be small and agile rather than large and imposing."

He reached for the invoice and turned it around so that it once again faced the Mayor, tapping the first line on the page.

"Two, for failing to realise that breaking an unsteady truce with a hive-mind composed of vermin would result in swift and immediate retribution from every crawling thing in the immediate vicinity."

He tapped the second indented line.

"And third, for living up to your name by trying to chisel us out of a previously agreed fee, again."

He tapped the third line, the one with the largest price tag, then slid the open notebook over the gleaming wood to rest beside it.

Chisel glanced at the rough hand-drawn grid with it's scrawled annotations and laughed.

"Shitty customer bingo," he said. "I believe I sense Mister Teller's hand at work."

"You should be proud," Simon told him, straight-faced. "He made you the central square."

The Mayor looked closer.

"Delightful," he said, and almost seemed to mean it.

He pushed the notebook back towards Simon, then turned to a small sideboard on which a crystal decanter stood alongside three matching tumblers. The crisp lines of his navy-blue suit jacket blocked Simon's view as he fiddled with something on it, before turning back with a glass in one hand and a personalised seal in the other.

He pressed the stamp into the paper, which immediately began to blacken and char as a red liquid that was almost certainly not ink spread out from beneath the edges of the seal, filling the room with the smell of burning and the faint sound of remembered screams.

"Drop that with my secretary on your way out," he told Simon. "He'll see to it that you're paid in full."

He took a sip from the glass.

"Aren't you going to offer me one?" asked Simon, gesturing at the uncorked bottle.

Chisel raised an eyebrow.

"You would almost certainly think I was trying to poison you," he said.

"I would," Simon nodded. "I just wanted to see if you'd push it."

Chisel shook his head.

"Mister Holmes," he said. "It remains one of my greatest regrets that you've chosen not to avail yourself of the employment opportunities offered by my office. We could do great things."

Simon stood, taking the stained and still-screaming sheet of paper by a single untouched corner.

"I could do great things for you, you mean," he said. "And in return, you'd take the credit and then, one day, my face."

"It's a trustworthy face," the Mayor agreed, pleasantly.


Ongoing Verse: Holmes Brothers

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Ongoing Verse: The Powers That Be

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Ongoing Verse: Microwave

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"Big Moo!" cried Simon, almost slipping in the dew-wet grass as he hurried over to meet his patient. "What's happened to you?"

Big Moo, the only cloud buffalo in all of Indiana, mooed. Unlike the usual ebullient greeting that had given him his name, today his lowing was faint and weak.

"Darn Sewer Clowns have been at him," said Farmer Chambers, indicating a bald patch where Big Moo's thick coating of white rubbery balloons had been torn away. "They don't normally come this far up the Mountain, but I guess they got tired of hunting little kids and sushi queens."

Ongoing Verse: Microwave

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Ongoing Verse: Janet

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There's blood on the ground and the strange, misshapen footprints in the soil are already overflowing with cold October rain. The full moon is reflected in the puddle's rippling surface, pumpkin-orange and hanging so low in a cloudless sky that the Harvest thinks he could touch it.

His mouth is dry, and the water looks cooling and sweet. He longs to drink, but his mother's voice whispers the old stories in the cavernous vault of his memories, and the Harvest King licks parched lips with a dusty tongue, and presses on.

Someone is wailing in pain, wolf-howl angry. He's close.

Ongoing Verse: Harvest

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Ongoing Verse: The Powers That Be

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The world around them seemed very quiet. The ever-present hum from Chimpbee's sprawling hive seemed suddenly very far away. The low smoulder of charcoal and the hiss and bop of cooking meat was muffled, as though they watched from behind a pane of glass.

Marshall's eyes drifted back to the house. Simon tugged on his sleeve to get his attention, something he hadn't done since he was a decade younger and almost three feet shorter.

"Don't," he said again. "You'd never outrun his dogs, and you'd never let yourself join them."

The shadow of Wolf Mountain loomed large between them.

Ongoing Verse: Microwave

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Ongoing Verse: Harvest

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When the last barricade falls, Syndi can feel it. It's in the quality of the screams, the sounds of shifting debris. Something is coming to an end.

Her Miss Tornado Day sash, once a blinding satiny white any bride could be proud of, is fraying, grubby, and caked with gore. She slips out of it and unpicks the knot holding the two ends together.

Part of her is glad that Marshall can't see this, sure that he'd offer up some smart-alecky comment as she pushes sweat-damp hair off her face and keeps it there with a John Rambo-style bandana fashioned from a ribbon that once marked her out as a sacrifice for a sentient tornado.

Part of her wishes he was here anyway.

And another part of her wonders if she should have gone to Old Bob, when she was seventeen and her year was up, when the town chose a new Miss Tornado Day and she'd been sent out into the cyclone to die. Things might have turned out differently. For her, for the people she loved, even for Eerie.

If Marshall was here, she'd ask him about becoming the Harvest King. About the mountain and the wolf that howled in the night, and whether blood spilled under an October moon might have prevented all of this.

If he was here with her, hiding in the ruins of the Eerie Bingo Parlour, she would ask him whether it might have been worth it.

The tombola drum near the western windows begins to spin, slow at first, a handful of human teeth inside clicking against the rusting metal. Syndi reaches for the last remaining incendiary device - homemade hand grenades fashioned from stripped-down bingo dabbers and some sort of fruit cordial she'd discovered at the very back of the Parlour's walk-in refrigerator, covered in warning stickers and pulsating faintly.

Outside in the dark, something moves. The room she's in is three floors up, but the Garbage Men know how to climb. She'd seen them swarming like lizards over the surface of City Hall, the living surface of the building twitching and flinching at every touch.

She didn't blame it. In it's place, she'd have torn out her own foundations to avoid those clammy, grasping hands. Of course, in a very real way, the Garbage Men had already done that for her.

Syndi flicks open Janet's lighter and steps towards the glass.

Ongoing Verse: The Children

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Ongoing Verse: Milkman

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Ongoing Verse: Teller Family History

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Submitted by froodle

What was Eerie like before the Harvest King tradition got started? What happened that kickstarted the 13 year cycle of sacrificing someone to the Eerie Wolf?

It's Tuesday, so today you get a choice between two prompts. Pick one, combine both, pit them against each other - on Tuesday, you choose!

This week, your options are:

Wolf Mountain versus World o' Stuff

It's a full moon tonight, the official Harvest Moon of the Northern Hemisphere, and Eerie's Harvest King must venture out onto Wolf Mountain in order to catch a glimpse of the mysterious Eerie Wolf before heading off to... Spain.

The planned screening in Manchester might not be happening, but since I'm here anyway I thought you might enjoy a look at my Meetup Jacket (tm):

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Eerie, Indiana bookstack brooches by HelloCrumpet. Better Weird Than Dead blackboard by Sugar and Vice. Eerie, Indiana/Z Nation crossover by SoozysCraftorim. El Gordo/conjoined piglets pin by DemonicPinfestation. World o' Stuff and POP16661 sign by MattRyanTobin. Eerie, Indiana pin by SuperYakiStuff. Husky brooch by AcrylicAsylum.

It's a full moon tonight, the official Harvest Moon of the Northern Hemisphere, and Eerie's Harvest King must venture out onto Wolf Mountain in order to catch a glimpse of the mysterious Eerie Wolf before heading off to... Spain.